D&D 5E What are the Roles now?

[SirAntoine]

The befriended animal would be empowered.

 

[pemerton]

But there are people, plenty of them, who view HP as a metagame construct too. In spite of all evidence to the contrary (fungibility of HP via Vampiric Touch, the fact that contact poisons trigger on a "hit" and not on reaching 0 HP, the fact that HP function while you are asleep, etc., etc.) there are people who view HP degradation not as actual physical injury but rather as a kind of luck depletion

I think you would put me in that boat (although my approach is looser than what you describe).

But my preferred version of D&D - 4e - doesn't have the Vampiric Touch mechanic you describe. Rather, it's vampiric powers grant hit points in amounts that are relative to the caster rather than the target. The mechanic that you describe is exactly the sort of mechanic that tells against a purely metagame interpretation of the animal friend's buff.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

5e's resolution system is pretty open-ended. Your ability to train up an animal through 'mundane' means is limited only by your DM's judgement, in that sense. DMs are even encouraged to create new Backgrounds. 'Beast-tamer' or something could be one. Either way, your non-caster Ranger could have an animal. Not an Animal Companion in the in 3.x sense, but an animal they keep around.

D&D has often leaned towards the physically possible being inaccessible to fighters, but yeah, no reason anyone should need a ranger spell to have a pet. Even a dangerous wild one. Just, y'know, hope your DM finds the idea plausible, since he'll be setting the DCs.

Yeah, "get your DM to buy your house rules" is just as BS as "hope your DM doesn't kill your pet" in my book. There's a difference between rules that are made to be flexible and adaptable to DM taste, and begging your DM to let something work.

 

[Uchawi]

5E begs for the DMs attention.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

5E begs for the DMs attention.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. Is that a positive or negative thing? Or neither? What about 5e makes it so?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yeah, "get your DM to buy your house rules" is just as BS as "hope your DM doesn't kill your pet" in my book. There's a difference between rules that are made to be flexible and adaptable to DM taste, and begging your DM to let something work.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that 5e does leave open having a non-spell-coerced/non-class-feature animal following your character around. Mind you, if the ranger does get a non-magical pet class feature at some point, it'll make it pretty unlikely that anyone without that feature will be able to talk their DM into a series of skill checks to 'tame' one. That's another issue that's just common to games like D&D, that expand by adding rules. Often a rule intended to introduce a new option will actually close that option off, by moving it from whatever open-ended sub-system it might have fallen under before, to a clear, defined sub-system.

FWIW.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that 5e does leave open having a non-spell-coerced/non-class-feature animal following your character around. Mind you, if the ranger does get a non-magical pet class feature at some point, it'll make it pretty unlikely that anyone without that feature will be able to talk their DM into a series of skill checks to 'tame' one. That's another issue that's just common to games like D&D, that expand by adding rules. Often a rule intended to introduce a new option will actually close that option off, by moving it from whatever open-ended sub-system it might have fallen under before, to a clear, defined sub-system.

FWIW.

My barbarian player had a pet wolf that he captured from goblins and trained over the course of several weeks to accept as its new master. That wolf was his pride and joy, and the fact that it wasn't a class feature (he doesn't even know Animal Handling, had to rely on raw Wisdom and help from outside experts) doesn't even come into it.

Due to a series of unlucky events and tragic rolls, he had to make a choice last session: both the wolf and another PC were at two failed death saves and he had to choose who to try to stabilize first. Spoiler: the wolf is dead now. But it was good while it lasted.

 

[Zalabim]

Often a rule intended to introduce a new option will actually close that option off, by moving it from whatever open-ended sub-system it might have fallen under before, to a clear, defined sub-system.

FWIW.

The ranger is quite guilty of that already, though I try to avoid letting it influence the rest of the game. Natural Explorer's benefit of learning the size, number, and age of tracks seems like something any tracker could roll for, and Feral Senses knowledge of the location of non-hidden invisible enemies nearby is how I assume the combat rules work already. I view the first as being described to allow the ranger to "be a good tracker" even when they don't have a good tracking skill roll, and the second as necessary because combat in general would break down if you had to use an action (Search) to locate an invisible creature that is not hiding. Both features still give some concrete benefit, without limiting those parts of the abilities to only characters who have the features.

To bring it on topic, the ranger has choices of abilities that give it combat roles of striker and controller, primarily. The specific types are high damage, good target selection, area damage, area denial, action denial, and summoning. They have some defensive abilities, but being attacked is likely to impair their spells and attacks, and they have cure wounds and lesser restoration but no healing word equivalent or raising the dead, and no offensive buffs like bless.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Rangers can also summon a pack of wolves with Conjure Animal. They are fragile but very nasty offensively.

 

[Xxandx]

It seems to me that in 5e you can choose more or less your own role, depending how you choose to create your character. All classes seems to have a variety of builds. And with multiclassing you can mix it up even more.

Our DM wants certain areas covered like healing and tanking etc. but he also wants variety. A character needs to function outside of battle as well. If the characters only ability is dealing a lot of damage in battle, it will strugle outside of battle and be of lesser use for the rest of the group. Our DM wants us to interact with the world and our surroundings, explore, investigate, research, track, sneak, climb etc. Fighting monsters and badguys is just one part of it.

In one of our earlier campaigns I created a Dwarven Cleric: Life Domain. He could heal, but he could also blast targets with area attack spells. He could buff up other characters with bless. But with heavy armor, shield and a battleaxe, he also function as a Tank, working along side with a Paladin and a Fighter.
I added 2 feats:
-War Caster: At opportunity attacks he could blast them with spells.
-Sentinel: When hitting targets with opportunity attacks, their speed is reduced to 0 for the rest of the turn. Also you get a reaction, if an adjacent enemy attacks someone other than you, you get an extra attack.